Contacting leads is something that you can’t waste a minute, let’s dive in right away.
Exceptional research made by LeadResponseManagement.org a few years ago showed that the more you wait to contact a lead when you receive it, the less probability you have to connect with it.
Per the study summary:
“The odds of contacting a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 100 times. The odds of qualifying a lead if called in 5 minutes versus 30 minutes drop 21 times.”
This is also supported by a recent 2019 study conducted by CallHippo that concluded that waiting more than an hour to contact a lead resulted in a 450% decrease in response rate.
It’s incredible how such a “short” time makes such a big difference.
Companies average contact time
A study made by Harvard Business Review auditing 2,241 U.S. companies, found out that only about 37% of the companies contacted their leads within the first hour, 16% within 1 to 24 hours, 24% took more than 24 hours and the remaining 23% never responded at all.
The average time of companies that responded within 30 days was 42 hours.
They also pointed out that contacting the leads within an hour were nearly 7 times more likely to have an important conversation with the decision-makers than those that waited more than 60 minutes. If a competitor is averaging 42 hours contacting leads, you have a good opportunity to get there first.
Whoever gets there first
Another study made by Lead Connect gave the following insight, 78% of customers buy from the first company to contact them after their inquiry.
They also found out that sales conversion is 391% higher in the first minute of the lead being submitted.
This makes total sense. An online lead means that the potential customer is actively looking for a solution to their problem.
The magic of the internet is that if the visitor didn’t get an answer from the first site, they will go to the next one until they’ve found what they’re looking for.
So, it doesn’t matter if you have an outstanding marketing campaign that attracts a bunch of leads. You’re not getting the most out of them by not getting in touch on time.
Simple Example
Let’s do the following example, Joe is a real estate agent that manages a few properties.
Imagine that whenever he sells a house, he gets a $5,000 commission.
On average he receives 20 leads per day which mean that in a month he should get 600 leads (20 leads per day X 30 days). Let’s assume that he sells 1 house every 60 leads.
In this case, he should sell 10 houses per month making a total of $50,000 in commission (not bad Joe).
This is the ideal scenario if he’s able to contact the online lead within the appropriate time frame.
But, let’s take into consideration what we learned from the different studies mentioned before in this article.
If he calls 2 or 3 hours later to those online leads, there’s a great possibility that those potential customers got a phone call from another real estate agent, since they’ve been looking into different real estate agents’ websites.
Due to the fact, Joe waited too long to call the leads and most of those leads purchased from other agents, instead of selling the 10 houses that he usually sells, he only sold 2 houses making $10,000 in commission.
Conclusion
So in the immortal words of Benjamin Franklin:
“Remember that time is money”
